The privacy risks of compiling mobility data

Urban planners and researchers at MIT found that it’s shockingly easy to “reidentify” the anonymous data that people generate all day, every day in cities.
Thanks to the near-complete saturation of the city with sensors and smartphones, we humans are now walking, talking data factories. Passing through a subway turnstile, sending a text, even just carrying a phone in your pocket: we generate location-tagged data on an hourly basis. All that data can be a boon for urban planners and designers who want to understand cities–and, of course, for tech companies and advertisers who want to understand the people in them. Questions about data privacy are frequently met with a chorus of, It’s anonymized! Any identifying features are scrubbed from the data! Read Full Story

A new study by MIT researchers finds that the growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about people's movement patterns is a double-edged sword: While it can provide deep insights ...